Health Social Media Creators. Micro influencers on Instagram

Abstract

Traditionally, health programmes were framed in the general media, especially on television, where it was not difficult to find leading experts who became familiar faces to the general public. However, the arrival of new technologies and their subsequent democratisation has meant that for a large part of the population, online has become a priority channel for accessing both information and leisure. For this reason, many experts in different fields have opted to use a digital strategy focused on dissemination to ensure that their messages reach the recipients more effectively. Thus, health communicators have found in blogs and social networks a way to disseminate their messages and bring science closer to the public. This phenomenon has increased exponentially with the arrival of the covid-19 crisis in 2020, as, faced with the uncertainty caused by the health emergency, millions of users turned to social platforms to find answers to their doubts and concerns.
This study focuses on the use that creators of health content make of Instagram to become opinion leaders and focuses on the analysis of the phenomenon of micro-influencers of health communication in Spain. To this end, 5 user accounts with communities of less than 100,000 followers are studied by analysing the content of their publications. The main topics they address are identified and the expressive and discursive resources they use are determined.
The results show that the use of video and the use of visual resources is a constant in the production of the opinion leaders studied. All of them use an accessible and accessible language that avoids unnecessary technicalities and that advocates making their proposals comprehensible to the general public. The conclusions indicate that an appropriate use of infotainment content creation strategies based on the visual resources and tools offered by Instagram have turned these users into relevant influencers. In addition, interaction with users is key to providing valuable content that makes experts relevant to their network of contacts.